In an interview with Politico last week, Donald Trump reflected on what he believes will be the key issue in the 2026 midterm elections. “It’ll be about pricing,” he said.
As part of the same exchange, the Republican president talked about the cost of “energy,” before getting more specific. “Electricity is down. It’s way down,” Trump said. “You know, when the gasoline goes down and when the oil and oil and gas go down, the electricity comes down naturally. But it’s all coming down. It’s all coming down. It’s coming beautifully.”
American consumers would surely be delighted if their president were telling the truth, but he’s not.
As the editorial board of The New York Times recently explained, “Electricity prices are almost 10 percent higher than they were a year earlier, according to the most recent numbers.”
The editorial conceded that multiple factors have contributed to the rising costs, but the Times’ editors added that the Republican administration’s energy policies “are not helping — and will soon make matters worse.”
A new report in The Wall Street Journal pointed in the same direction.
Most Americans are paying more for electricity — and need to prepare their wallets for further pain ahead.
Data centers are getting much of the blame lately for rising power costs, but they aren’t the only catalyst and don’t always cause increases. The reasons our bills are rising are complex and varied. Hurricanes, wildfires, state renewable-energy plans and the replacement of aging or damaged grid equipment are all playing a role.
As a candidate on the campaign trail last year, Trump seemed to recognize the political potency of this issue, which led him to make some rather specific promises.
“We intend to slash prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months,” he said in August 2024. He went on to claim, “We’re looking to cut them in half, and we think we’ll be able to do better. … You will never have had energy so low as you will under a certain gentleman known as Donald J. Trump. Have you heard of him? So we think your energy bills will be down by 50% to 70%. How good would that be?”
In theory, it would have been quite good indeed. But as the first year of Trump’s second term comes to an end, the president has failed spectacularly to deliver on his promise. The curious thing about these developments is that Trump could plausibly explain why rising electricity prices are not entirely his fault. But instead of making the case to the public about why he doesn’t bear full responsibility for the problem, the president has decided to manufacture an alternate reality in which the problem doesn’t exist, and electricity costs are “way down.” That the president is the nation’s most prolific liar is nothing new, but I continue to believe there’s a qualitative difference between regular ol’ lying and self-defeating lying. Often, when Trump peddles nonsense, the American mainstream isn’t immediately sure what to believe, and it falls to media fact-checkers to offer the public guidance on what’s true and what’s not. But when the president tells Americans that electricity prices are “coming down … beautifully,” no one needs a fact-checker; they just need a bill from their local power company. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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